Up All Night

How do you keep from raising your voice all the time?  Do you try?  Can you?  How many questions can I ask in the first thirty words of this post?

N is 4 1\2 going on 15.  She seems to have reached peak annoying for me at the moment.  I find myself trying to find excuses for her to have to go to bed early.  This is not usually that difficult as part of her problem at the moment is that she is exhausted pretty much all the time.

Flynn or Flyer? Your guess is as Good as Mine

My son has a strange predilection.  I have no idea how it has come about, nor what to do about it, therefore the only sensible thing to do is tell everyone about it.  A problem shared is a problem that other people can laugh at you about, as they say.

It started fairly early, about as soon as he could speak really.  His vocabulary, despite evidence on this blog to the contrary, is pretty limited, he can say 'digger' and 'up' (which for a while was a stand in for any sort of directional command.  Watching visitors struggle with how to get him higher as they were squashing him up against the ceiling while he was bellowing 'up' at them was for a while one of my guiltiest of guilty pleasures, he has now learnt 'down' as well, so so much for that.)  'Bird' has also been a particular favourite of his.  But one word has stood out above all others as his go-to word in almost any circumstance. It displays a singleness of mind, as well as such strange taste, that I find a little worrying.

She's a girl!

Shopping has never been my favourite activity.  Along with millions of other men, I dreaded a shopping trip and would spend the entire time making snide comments about anything and everything.  Being a father has not really changed my feelings towards shopping, it has, however, ramped up my dread for these occasions.

I first noticed a real change in the shopping experience when people suddenly started stopping us to look at the Buglet and chat to us.  This caught me totally by surprise, it was not a practice in which I had engaged before having the child and I was just not expecting complete strangers to strike up a conversation amongst the processed meats.  For a start, why couldn’t they have picked a more exotic aisle to examine my child in?

A question of children

I had an interview today.  It went quite well thank you.  Why is it that you always come out of an interview feeling like you must have sounded like a complete idiot, as though you have been answering the questions in Hebrew, whilst standing on your head and juggling with your feet.  Or is it just me?  And anyway, if I had done all of those things I think they should just give me the job, who else do you know that can speak Hebrew and juggle with their feet?

All of this interview stuff got me thinking, unfortunately none of it was fit to publish as a blog post so I did what I always do in tight corners and asked my wife what I should write about.  That, by the way, is not the best question to ask when the tight corner you are in is surrounded by panthers. So here we are, with a simple question to answer.  What would you ask if you were interviewing prospective parents?

They're not Terry's, they're ours, unfortunately.

7 years ago today I watched the woman of my dreams walk up the aisle towards me as I waited to become a married man, and whilst this blog isn’t about me and her I feel like it is appropriate to take a little time to think about 7 wonderful years.

Enough time?  Good, now back to the calamities. 

We use cloth, reusable nappies, the majority of which are shaped.  Just like this.

I'll never look this clean ever again

 However, we also have some square terry nappies, which are just like this. 

Doesn't look like it could make a grown man cry does it?

The First Word is the Hardest.

First words are tricky things, both for the child and the parent.  For the child it is the moment that they introduce themselves.  This is what people are going to be talking about in twenty years time.  “Yes, well, my Johnny’s first word was kumquat, so beat that,” your parents will say in just one more attempt to keep up with the Joneses, (as everyone knows, Martha Jones’ first word was triceratops as she stood in the Natural History museum pointing out the spelling mistake to the curator.  We just can’t hope to keep up.)  First words stay with us, you really want them to be something big, something important, something Descartes would have been proud to have said, and let’s be honest, isn’t there a moment in all of our lives when we wish we’d been the first to say cogito ergo sum? Just me?  Oh well. 

A Perpetual Holiday

When did going on holiday become such a chore?  Actually I can pinpoint the exact time.  It was the point at which we had our first child and suddenly the amount of stuff and junk that we had to try to fit into the car expanded exponentially.  From being a couple who packed fairly lightly we turned into a family for whom the kitchen sink just wasn’t enough.  If we haven’t got all the kitchen cupboards and the bread bin then we haven’t been trying hard enough.